Close-Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

Record Details:

Title:
Close-Up
Date:
Jul-Dec 1928
Publisher:
[London, etc., Pool]
Volume:
Close up ... devoted to the art of films
Leaf #:
000465
Language:
English
Subjects:
motion pictures, Motion pictures -- Periodicals
Collection:
Global Cinema, Switzerland, and Early Cinema
Format:
Periodicals
Contributor:
Library of Congress, MBRS, Moving Image Section
Sponsor:
Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
As an active film magazine, CLOSE UP lasted only a short time, from 1927 to 1933. Yet the legacy of this English-language periodical, which was published in Switzerland, continues to matter. Edited by Bryher and her husband Kenneth Macpherson, CLOSE UP became THE magazine for energetic debates about the nature of cinema and manifestos imagining new forms of filmmaking and spectatorship. The magazine published articles by filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, and female literary modernists, such as H.D. and Gertrude Stein. As film scholar Anne Friedberg explains in the anthology CLOSE-UP, 1927-1933: CINEMA & MODERNISM, 'CLOSE UP became the model for a certain type of writing about film -- writing that was theoretically astute, politically incisive, critical of films that were simply 'entertainment.' For six and a half years, CLOSE UP maintained a forum for a broad variety of ideas about the cinema; it never advocated a single direction of development, but rather posed alternatives to existing modes of production, consumption, and film style.' Like Friedberg's own writing, CLOSE UP continues to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of film and media theory. -- Eric Hoyt, 2014
Date Added:
June 20, 2024
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CLOSE UP Psychic events are most freely outwardly perceptible when mirrored in facial expression. The obvious procedure for the film, therefore, was to build itself up upon the actor's power of facial expression. This procedure soon demonstrated its futility ; for man expresses his emotions and passions far more powerfully and explicitly by word of mouth than by movement and facial expression. The film that is built up on mimicry is simply dumb-show, pantomime, an absurd hybrid powerless either to reproduce or to develop itself. What, then, can we substitute for these so severely limited mimetics ? To make human beings artificially dumb is not the proper business of the film, but things are dumb and we do not need to close their mouth by force if we are able to make them express psychic acts, which find their outlet through them, around them, or because of them. This is amply demonstrated by the modern films in which the Russians, and notably Eisenstein in Panzerkreuzer Potemkin, have gone furthest and most successfully. Mimetic expression is here only one amongst many means of enhancing an effect already created from another source. The actor stands on an equality with inanimate things. Like them, he can embody the movement of the drama ; but only so far as his embodiment is of such psychic events as are before or beyond speech ; by this means reflexes — and, above all, those small unnoticed ineptitudes of behaviour described by Freud as symptomatic actions become the centre of mterest. According to Freud these so small, and in themselves so trivial and insignificant movements — as, for example, the dropping or losing of an object, the thoughtless toying with some small article, the forgetting or omitting of some action < 9